#I was literally shaking when I saw Jack Lawrence because I like a lot of things but I've never seen anyone irl who's been INVOLVED with it

[queenofcats17]

Unraveled by Timothy Lawrence

I’ve never written anything in the Borderlands fandom, but I saw this post by @0pixer and I guess I’m writing it

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Timothy Lawrence’s life has significantly improved now that Jack is dead and he’s managed to get a job that doesn’t involve killing people. He’s very done with killing people. Rhys has given him a job at ATLAS doing...Well, his official job has something to do with media relations or something. Mostly he makes weird videos where he goes weirdly in-depth about various subjects. Usually books. Sometimes movies. Once he deconstructed a Bunkers and Badasses campaign with the help of Rhys and Vaughn. He’s gained quite a following.

Today, his video opens as it often does, with Tim standing in front of a black background which he may or may not pin pieces of paper to in some strange string board. He’s grown his hair out a bit since joining Atlas, and his ginger hair has started to come back along with his freckles. Today he’s wearing a sweater with a cartoon cat on it.

“As you all probably know, I have an English degree. Before I started working for Jack, I went to school for English. I was going to be a writer.” Tim’s expression is some mix of irritated and existential wondering who his life had ended up this way.

“Anyway,” he clears his throat and continues. “I have an English degree. And today I’m going to use it. To take apart this awful romance novel!” He holds up a book with a giant grin. It looks like something you’d pick up at the drug store and has a stylized illustration of Handsome Jack and a swooning damsel on the front.

“I’m going to tear this apart.” The glee is readily apparent on Tim’s face. He looks absolutely ecstatic to destroy this book, both figuratively and literally. Because he will be burning this once the segment is over. “Despite being told that this is a bad idea and it’s just a book, I’m going to do this anyway!” 

“As if we could stop you.” Sasha’s voice comes from off-screen. Tim disregards this, his smile widening. 

“Vaughn and Fiona found this while scavenging the charred remains of Helios for supplies.” Tim opens the book, flipping through a few pages. “They were just going to burn it for fuel, but then Fiona read a few pages and it was so bad she brought it back so we could all laugh at it.” He starts giggling in anticipation. 

“I kind of remember Jack having these things produced, but, well,” he pauses and lets out an undignified snort. “He had a lot of shitty propaganda produced. I’m pretty sure Rhys owned all of it.”

“I did not!” Rhys’ indignant voice comes from behind the camera.

“Bro, half the stuff in our apartment was Handsome Jack merch.” Vaughn’s voice comes from behind the camera as well. There’s a huff, presumably from Rhys. 

“Alright, fine, but I didn’t have that.”

“Well, as an expert on all things Handsome Jack, you wanna tell us how the Jack in this masterpiece measures up to the real thing?” Tim asks with an innocent smile. 

“Why would I know?” Rhys asks. “You were the one who worked with him!”

“But you were the one who had him in your head,” Vaughn says. “Oh, I never really asked, but did he see your dick? I always kind of wondered if he did and he made any comments or-” There’s a muffled screaming sound from off-screen, presumably Rhys yelling into a pillow.  

“Anyway, let’s move on~,” Tim says in a sing-song voice. “So. First off, what is the plot of this book?” His expression grows comically grim. “That’s very important to talk about if we’re going to tear this thing apart.” 

There are various stifled giggles and snorts as the others in the room try to keep themselves together. 

“The book follows Felicia, an accountant from Atlas who gets sent to Pandora by her,” he pauses and flips to a page. “‘Horrible heartless bastards of bosses’.” 

“Definitely not biased.” Fiona snorts derisively.

“Why would you even suggest that?” Sasha gasps, although it’s clear she’s trying to fight back laughter. 

“Felicia has been sent to Pandora to deliver an important document, but she’s a delicate flower who isn’t suited to Pandora’s harsh climate and inhabitants. She can’t survive in this awful awful world.” Tim continues to summarize the book as if it isn’t propaganda disguised as a trashy romance novel. “Almost as soon as she touches down on the planet, bandits kidnap her, sure that her employers will pay handsomely to have her back. But they abandon her to the locals! Felicia is lost in despair until...” He looks dramatically up at the camera. “She’s rescued by none other than Handsome Jack!”

There’s a dramatic gong crash, followed by a panicked yelp. 

“Warn me before you do that!” Rhys’ muffled voice hisses. 

“Sorry,” Vaughn whispers back.

“Both Jack and Felicia are wary of each other, they are from rival companies after all, but Jack cannot let a defenseless woman suffer in the company of bandits.” Tim bites back a condescending laugh as his showman act starts to break. “So he kills all the bandits, which might be the only thing in this book that actually seems plausible. Anyway, after he kills all the bandits he takes Felicia back to Helios. There’s a lot of that whole enemies to lovers trope, along with Atlas trying to convince Felicia to secretly spy on Jack, but in the end, they fall in love and have a lot of sex. Very very in-depth sex. More in-depth than I am comfortable reading.”

“Is the sex accurate?” Sasha asks. Almost immediately, Tim goes bright red. 

“Fuck! I don’t...I don’t know!” He stammers. “It’s not like I watched him have sex!”

“So he didn’t make you have sex for him or anything?” Fiona asks. “I thought he’d have at least one person he made you take his place for. He seems like the kind of asshole who’d do that.”

“He didn’t want me ruining his reputation,” Tim mumbles, still partially hiding behind the book. “He thought I’d get nervous and freeze up. Which, uh, I...I did do a few times.” He quickly shakes his head, taking a deep breath. “But that’s beside the point. The point is, this is an awful book! Not only is the grammar awful, but the story structure doesn’t even make that much sense.”

He puts the book down, dragging in a box with a bunch of pieces of paper inside.

“I’ve written down my complaints,” he starts tacking up pieces of paper on the board with thumbtacks. “Firstly, how did Atlas manage to contact Felicia again after she gets onto Helios? They say in the book that all her Atlas tech is destroyed and go into great pains to describe how the bandits discarded her personal belongings and ripped off her clothes. There’s no way they’d even know she was alive, especially with how many precautions Jack takes to keep people from knowing she’s there. And they don’t even give any explanation for how Atlas figures out she’s on Helios! Second, why on Earth would Jack bring a woman he didn’t even know onto Helios? Sure, he thinks with his dick most of the time, but he didn’t get to be CEO of Hyperion by accident. Do you have any idea how paranoid he was? I couldn’t even take a piss in peace the whole time I worked for him...”

The next few minutes are filled up with Tim picking apart every inaccuracy and issue with the book, with a healthy dose of him complaining about what a dick Jack had been to work for. No one stops him A good portion of his rant is also taken up by him talking at length about how this was not how sex worked. 

“Has this person ever had sex? Because this is not how it works. I can count on one hand the number of sexual encounters I’ve had, but none of it was ever like this. I mean, for fuck’s sake! I don’t think this person has ever even seen a vagina, much less tried to bring the owner pleasure!” 

The more notes he tacks up on the board, the more disheveled he gets. His sweater is quickly discarded, his hair comes out of its ponytail, and his shirt becomes untucked. Sasha and Fiona can be heard laughing uproariously at various points throughout the video.

“Also! The creatures!” Tim jabs a finger into another note. “This author has obviously never spent any time on Pandora because neither varkids nor skags act anything like this!” He turns briefly away from the board, gesturing to someone offscreen. “Joining me to talk about these inaccuracies is Sir Alistair Hammerlock, whose sister I am both very attracted to and incredibly afraid of!”

“I would very much prefer not to speak of my sister.” Sir Hammerlock walks in, looking a tad uncomfortable. “Saying her name tends to summon her. Like some sort of witch.”

“Then let’s talk about skags and varkids and how they’ll kill you!” Tim says brightly, with an almost unhinged smile. 

“Well, that is something I’m more comfortable with.”

Sir Hammerlock launches into a speech about the finer points of skag and varkid biology and behavior. Not all of it is relevant to Tim’s critiques. Most of it is not relevant to Tim’s critiques. But it gives Tim some time to collect himself and look less like an insane professor. And Sir Hammerlock seems so delighted to be talking about the fauna of Pandora.

“In conclusion,” Tim says when Sir Hammerlock has finished. “Please don’t try any of what you read in this book. You will die. Painfully. Probably screaming.”

“Yes. Quite.” Sir Hammerlock nods, glancing at the notes Tim has tacked up and Tim’s still rather disheveled appearance. “I’ll be seeing myself out.”

“We’ll be sending your payment in the mail!” Vaughn calls after him. Tim turns his gaze back to the camera, gleeful and giddy once more.

“This book is so bad.” He giggles. “I hate it so much. Which is what makes this next part even better.”

“Should I get out the trashcan?” Sasha asks. 

“Yes. It is time.” Tim’s smile grows. Sasha appears with a large metal trash bin, which she deposits in front of Tim. Tim drops the book into the trash bin and Fiona appears to squirt some sort of liquid inside. It’s quickly clear that this liquid was lighter fluid, as when Tim strikes a match and drops it into the trashcan a pillar of flame shoots up. 

“The evil has been cleansed!” Tim cackles, sounding eerily like Jack. He’s illuminated eerily by the raging flames and actually looks a bit menacing. The camera cuts off after this, presumably so that they can put out the fire. 

#borderlands #fanfiction #timothy lawrence #rhys the company man #vaughn the money man #sasha the kid sister #fiona the con artist #sir hammerlock

[dan-wreck]

BOWIE #2 - STARDUST MEMORIES 

Photo by Mick Rock

Oh stop groaning, you can name a piece of writing with a Woody Allen pun when the person you're writing it about is a cultural Zelig.

Soon there's going to be a whole generation where the Bowie they remember is the dead Bowie. The sanitised version who is forming in the popular imagination. Then after that there's going to be a generation who don't have a Bowie. Figuratively and literally, kids born into a post Bowie era. Pity them more. I guess how you first encountered him is a question of when you grew up and your surroundings: a guy I worked with at my last job, 20 years older than me, announced "That guy from Labyrinth is dead!". Presumably, somewhere, there's a die hard Merry Christmas Mr Lawrence fan who was mourning the death of Jack Celliers. We may never know.

For many people the Bowie they remember is Ziggy Bowie, whether they were alive to see him bringing bisexuality onto the BBC or not. Maybe this is one of the reasons behind the recent cringeworthy trend of calling him "the Starman" the same way that faux-matey twats call Paul Weller the Modfather. Maybe it's just that these people are idiots. Bowie himself didn't really seem to think of Ziggy as an enduring character or perhaps he just felt like he’d said all he could through that conduit. He laid him to rest after Aladdin Sane after all: around 42 years before he finished creating. Ziggy was really strictly speaking a footnote. The relatively anonymous figure of Major Tom, however, was one he kept returning to: after Space Oddity he came back in Ashes To Ashes, then again in Hallo Spaceboy (the Pet Shop Boys remix particularly) and then finally we see him dead in the Blackstar video.

Ashes To Ashes for instance: Major Tom is strung out in heaven's high and hitting an all time low. This, though, at a time when Bowie's cultural stock was quite high. He was incredibly cool. He was still selling a lot of records. He was the one person who could hang out in the living room of a confused and senile Bing Crosby or at a tiny punk gig and fit equally well with either. There was no point reviving Ziggy because a whole load of New Romantics and Goths were doing it. The fact that this new flock of painted birds were very inspired by him was something that'd become crushingly obvious when Bauhaus did their borderline karaoke version of Ziggy Stardust in 82. Bowie embraced his bastard children with open arms, casting them as his grim entourage in his video, with one notable exception.

Gary Numan. A huge fan who wound up getting thrown off the set of a TV show they were both on and being dismissed as the "same old thing in brand new drag" in Teenage Wildlife because our man was feeling a bit insecure about this new pretender. Which is a bit rich, really, considering that young Bowie himself was a fusion of Iggy, Newley, Scott Walker and whoever else he could latch onto. Numan was certainly no more derivative than Bowie and it wasn’t just Bowie he was drawing from: he drew as much from JG Ballard and Philip K Dick novels and John Foxx as he did from the Spider from Bromley. It’s allso amusing considering that he sings Teenage Wildlife in a voice uncannily similar to that of Billy MacKenzie, who his people had recognised the grand high art high camp potential of when they heard the Associates cover of Boys Keep Swinging and offered them a publishing deal; then later on "The midwives to history put on their bloody robes" is delivered in the voice of another Bowie acolyte, Richard Butler.

Make no mistake, Ashes to Ashes is simultaneously a high water mark, a brilliant pop record and the point where Bowie stopped being ahead of trends and started chasing them. It just so happened that a lot of these trends were started by people catching up to him. Confusing, no? In fact, this is the one point where you could maybe give some credence to the lazy critics idea of Bowie as "chameleon". Now at his best Bowie was never a chameleon. Especially when he was first Ziggy, actually because there's no way Bowie / Ziggy was blending into the background: he was an incredibly beautiful, sexually ambiguous peacock character. But during the 80s he did blend in quite a lot. He was just another one of the rank and file whether prancing about onstage with anonymous session hacks on the Glass Spider tour or just being "one of the guys" with Tin Machine. It didn't really suit him. It was unnerving. It still seemed like a costume but a very lazy one. The equivalent of Bowie turning up to the macabre Halloween coke party of 80s pop in casual clothes and saying "I came as David Jones".

So the next time we saw Major Tom in a lot of people's eyes he really was hitting an all-time low. Not everyone's, not the die-hards and not people who buy and listen to music based on what they hear, not what they're told by a music press who had been swallowed up by the sexless and jingoistic Britpop craze. See, with Outside what he'd done is released an elaborate concept album rife with pervy sexualised violence, violent sex, drugs, strange invented characters and references to obscure artists and art movements like Chris Burden (already visited in the Berlin days on Joe The Lion), Herman Nitsch and the Vienna Actionists. The visual component was a huge part of it all again, with unnerving videos like Samuel Bayer’s The Hearts Filthy Lesson. In interviews he was talking up Tricky and The Young Gods and saying how much he wanted to work with Glenn Branca. Being ahead of the curve by talking about the power of the internet as everyone thought he was nuts. He was even working extensively with Eno again.

You know - the sort of thing you want from Bowie!

This isn't what the British music press wanted. They wanted safe flag-waving and to be told what they knew to make them feel like they hadn't dumbed down to a degree which is still marring pop music with waves of Oasis clones because for a while it was acceptable to make bland drivel devoid of imagination or sensuality. They smeared Bowie's dabbling with jungle and drum'n'bass as a sad old man trying to stay in touch when in reality it was really just in continuity with him learning to play sax as a teenager because that's what all the cool jazz musicians he looked up to did, making "plastic soul" on Young Americans and welding the cold European sensibility of Low, "Heroes" and Lodger to the beating heart of the black American rhythm section of Davis, Murray and Alomar. Cultural segregation, two world wars and one world cup was what they wanted and they didn't want ageing mavericks showing up and demonstrating how hopelessly conservative they were.

A lot of the incredibly dull music being hyped up to the skies was, just like it was with the New Romantics, made by Bowie fans. So the time was right for him to come back but could he have not just have given them Ziggy again? Something with nice short songs, loud guitars, some dramatic strings. This time a bit more hetero, though, so the lads mag readers weren’t left shifting about uncomfortably again the way they were whenever they saw Richey James Edwards.

"Do you like girls or boys? It's confusing these days"

If you're not paying attention you can almost miss it but Hallo Spaceboy is, in fact, mentioning Ziggy / Bowie as much as it mentions Major Tom if not more. In those two lines we see Bowie cagily re-opening the closet door now it's safe for him to do so, and doing so on a mind-fuck of a concept album closer to the spirit of Ziggy or Diamond Dogs than almost anything he'd done since (The Thin White Duke was as much coke psychosis as an actual character). Before this the last time he was really clear about this was on Scream Like A Baby where he talked about queer bashing ("They came down on the faggots") and obliquely mentioned a gay love affair. Then let's look at the remix: it doesn't get much gayer than The Pet Shop Boys, really, does it? The Pet Shop Boys remixing a song from a polymorphously perverse album where he sings from the point of view of various genders: just listen to his alarming pitched-up Baby Grace voice or the strange androgynous Vocoderised ice queen voice of Ramona A Stone. 

Most offensively of all, though, however much you laughed at him it didn’t really work because he was very aware that it was funny. The segues between tracks were full of gallows humour and the Algeria Touchshriek voice sounds like nothing so much as Peter Cook’s E.L. Wisty character; it’s very serious stuff but as you hear Bowie intone “The screw is a tightening atrocity, I shake as the reeking flesh is as romantic as hell” in The Voyeur Of Utter Destruction (As Beauty) there’s a faint smirk under it. He is always aware of his own absurdity.

1.Outside didn't spawn any of the sequels he talked about doing but it's no surprise: artists tend to talk about at least five times as many ideas as they actually follow through and work on. There were drum'n'bass and jungle rhythms creeping in on I'm Deranged and We Prick You, some classic Bowie ballads like Strangers when We Meet (itself, like Teenage Wildlife, in the "Heroes" continuum and one of my favourite Bowie songs) and some homages to what Scott Walker was up to at the moment like The Motel or A Small Plot of Land. He wasn't setting the trends now: he was following them and the best you can hope for is that rather than trying to assimilate into it as he did in the 80s he was putting them into the Bowie blender.

This, however, misses the point that he was never that original in the first place! The way he presented his ideas was, and he had a unique singing voice but the fact is that he just had his ear to the underground and did these things to a mass audience so they just looked new. In that respect Outside is no more or less original than Low or one of the records everyone goes on about it just happens that when it came out it wasn't the first time the masses were hearing these sounds as it was when he made the second side of Low which sounds like Cluster or Harmonia. Bowie’s value wasn’t as an inventor of new sounds it was as a way of making them digestible and emotionally accessible to everyone in a way which may then allow the actual innovators (and he did always cite his sources) to break through to more success: this is quite laudable.

So then of course he went on tour with NIN, continuing to refuse to "act like a man his age". Now this raises an interesting question about Bowie's public perception. How is it that he was an old man 20 years ago when he was in his late 40's - early 50's but then when he died he was too young to go? Could it be that as rock'n'roll, still a young artform, develops that our perceptions of performers capability changes? The fact is that for a pervy old man, as he was labelled at the time, he still looked very youthful and very vital. Far sexier, far more dangerous than any of the Britpop boys who'd grown up on his music but who shuffled about in tracksuit tops and shapeless jeans. As this live TV clip shows, with Gail Ann Dorsey looking just as androgynous and unworldly as he ever did but with seemingly the minimum of effort; and Mike Garson looking deranged.

The right people were listening: Fincher saw the potential to run The Heart’s Filthy Lesson over the credits of Se7en and Lynch used I’m Deranged in Lost Highway. Both were similarly grim end of the 20th Century blues, meditations on madness. Both soundtracks, coincidentally enough, featured the work of NIN and Coil: it’s a little frustrating how close in terms of interests Bowie and Coil are, how few degrees of separation there are between these immensely influential queer occultist artists and that they never actually worked together. 

He continued in this vein with Earthling, still upsetting everyone by continuing to do what he felt like doing rather than digging up old characters. A subtle “fuck you” to the beige whitewashed sounds of Brit-pop in the cover where he wears a stained and tattered Union Jack coat as he looks out over an idealised version of England’s green (screened) and pleasant land. This on an album as infused with contemporary black music as Young Americans was. Even his huge 50th birthday show was as much of a celebration of Bowie present and looking forward as a fond look at what had been. Then, of course, "Hours" came.

Now "Hours" is perhaps an unfairly maligned album: if anyone else had put out an album with songs as great as Thursday's Child and Survive on they'd be praised to the skies and rightly so. They are moving, perfectly constructed pop songs but there's no real fire or spark of innovation in them. What little emotional impact there is has been drowned in high-tech production that covers everything in an unpleasant sheen. This is possibly as much Mark Plati and Reeves Gabrels fault as Bowie's as this is his most straightforwardly collaborative album (with every song co-credited to Gabrels) but I'm not sure. I feel like Reeves Gabrels gets unfairly criticised as he's been involved in some of the most ridiculous things Bowie has done (i.e. Tin Machine) and he appeared onstage in daft outfits playing wanky guitar solos.

He's also been involved in some of my favourite Bowie songs, however, and if you see him playing with The Cure he's not as huge a presence. He’s not jumping all over everything with fretboard tapping and lunging around waggling his tongue like Gene Simmons with a PhD: this implies that he cut such a larger than life figure because his boss wanted him to as much as anything else. So despite his persona bordering on that of a middle-aged man enthusiastically demonstrating FX pedals to you in a guitar shop, blaming him too much is misguided.

According to the excellent Pushing Ahead of the Dame blog, it was around this time Bowie started thinking about making a Ziggy Stardust film and as such he was annoyed by Velvet Goldmine's fictionalised steps into the same territory. Todd Haynes' Velvet Goldmine is an enjoyable film but I can see why he'd be so annoyed with it: it is clearly the work of a gay fan feeling betrayed by him “going back in” circa Let’s Dance. Possibly the great man was realising this wasn’t one of his best moves however well it worked at the time. After "Hours" was out and around the time of Heathen in 2002, Bowie changed his tune regarding Ziggy: “I’m running like fuck from that…Can you imagine anything uglier than a nearly 60-year-old Ziggy Stardust? I don’t think so!".

Similar ambivalence towards the idea is hinted at by the shelving of the video for the Pretty Things Are Going To Hell (itself a dual reference to The Stooges and Hunky Dory) where Bowie is menaced by huge puppets of past characters: the Pierrot from Ashes To Ashes, The Man Who Sold The World, The Thin White Duke and of course Ziggy. Maybe he judged it to be a bit on the nose.

It is an interesting change in perception we've undergone. In 1996 he was too old to be performing like he used to do but in 2013, at the age of 66, there were whispers about how great it'd be if he toured again. Not in any other industry do you expect a 66 year old man to get up onstage and dance about trying to be sexy for two or three hours a night. He could've done it like Dylan or Cohen (who only started touring again when he was much older than Bowie, true) but it wouldn't really have been his style: here was a man for who dance and mime and stagecraft had been an integral part of what made him a star. It’s still very present in his last videos and one of his final works was an honest to God musical after all.

So in the Blackstar video when we see that Major Tom is dead and at peace at last what are we to make of it? Clearing house for a whole new phase of experimentation and new ideas or a man on his last legs knowing that even if he didn't die straight after making this album he didn't have forever and was in the winter of his years? This is where we start to maybe give him too much credit. He was a man, and a great man but not a superhero. Superheroes don’t do things like release terrible covers of Iggy Pop songs with Tina Turner bolted onto them. “Ah but he only did that to keep his good friend financially solvent.”. Okay, good point.

He was a very intelligent man but not some towering inhuman intellect who could've predicted the moment Blackstar's "Something happened on the day he died, his spirit rose a metre and stepped aside" soundtracking the moment we knew we knew we knew. Maybe he predicted that it'd be a long while before somebody else took his place because things aren't set up that way. The industry has no interest in promoting bravery, the shock of the new. But he can't possibly have predicted that he was soundtracking millions of people thinking "He's gone, isn't he?" when he wrote that in remission. To think that he did is ridiculous, isn't it?

Isn't it?

#david bowie #1. outside #ashes to ashes #ziggy stardust #blackstar #brit pop #jungle

[afutureinnoise]

DAVID BOWIE, PART 2

BY DAN WRECK

Photo by Mick Rock

BOWIE #2 - STARDUST MEMORIES 

Oh stop groaning, you can name a piece of writing with a Woody Allen pun when the person you're writing it about is a cultural Zelig.

Soon there's going to be a whole generation where the Bowie they remember is the dead Bowie. The sanitised version who is forming in the popular imagination. Then after that there's going to be a generation who don't have a Bowie. Figuratively and literally, kids born into a post Bowie era. Pity them more. I guess how you first encountered him is a question of when you grew up and your surroundings: a guy I worked with at my last job, 20 years older than me, announced "That guy from Labyrinth is dead!". Presumably, somewhere, there's a die hard Merry Christmas Mr Lawrence fan who was mourning the death of Jack Celliers. We may never know.

For many people the Bowie they remember is Ziggy Bowie, whether they were alive to see him bringing bisexuality onto the BBC or not. Maybe this is one of the reasons behind the recent cringeworthy trend of calling him "the Starman" the same way that faux-matey twats call Paul Weller the Modfather. Maybe it's just that these people are idiots. Bowie himself didn't really seem to think of Ziggy as an enduring character or perhaps he just felt like he’d said all he could through that conduit. He laid him to rest after Aladdin Sane after all: around 42 years before he finished creating. Ziggy was really strictly speaking a footnote. The relatively anonymous figure of Major Tom, however, was one he kept returning to: after Space Oddity he came back in Ashes To Ashes, then again in Hallo Spaceboy (the Pet Shop Boys remix particularly) and then finally we see him dead in the Blackstar video.

Ashes To Ashes for instance: Major Tom is strung out in heaven's high and hitting an all time low. This, though, at a time when Bowie's cultural stock was quite high. He was incredibly cool. He was still selling a lot of records. He was the one person who could hang out in the living room of a confused and senile Bing Crosby or at a tiny punk gig and fit equally well with either. There was no point reviving Ziggy because a whole load of New Romantics and Goths were doing it. The fact that this new flock of painted birds were very inspired by him was something that'd become crushingly obvious when Bauhaus did their borderline karaoke version of Ziggy Stardust in 82. Bowie embraced his bastard children with open arms, casting them as his grim entourage in his video, with one notable exception.

Gary Numan. A huge fan who wound up getting thrown off the set of a TV show they were both on and being dismissed as the "same old thing in brand new drag" in Teenage Wildlife because our man was feeling a bit insecure about this new pretender. Which is a bit rich, really, considering that young Bowie himself was a fusion of Iggy, Newley, Scott Walker and whoever else he could latch onto. Numan was certainly no more derivative than Bowie and it wasn’t just Bowie he was drawing from: he drew as much from JG Ballard and Philip K Dick novels and John Foxx as he did from the Spider from Bromley. It’s allso amusing considering that he sings Teenage Wildlife in a voice uncannily similar to that of Billy MacKenzie, who his people had recognised the grand high art high camp potential of when they heard the Associates cover of Boys Keep Swinging and offered them a publishing deal; then later on "The midwives to history put on their bloody robes" is delivered in the voice of another Bowie acolyte, Richard Butler.

Make no mistake, Ashes to Ashes is simultaneously a high water mark, a brilliant pop record and the point where Bowie stopped being ahead of trends and started chasing them. It just so happened that a lot of these trends were started by people catching up to him. Confusing, no? In fact, this is the one point where you could maybe give some credence to the lazy critics idea of Bowie as "chameleon". Now at his best Bowie was never a chameleon. Especially when he was first Ziggy, actually because there's no way Bowie / Ziggy was blending into the background: he was an incredibly beautiful, sexually ambiguous peacock character. But during the 80s he did blend in quite a lot. He was just another one of the rank and file whether prancing about onstage with anonymous session hacks on the Glass Spider tour or just being "one of the guys" with Tin Machine. It didn't really suit him. It was unnerving. It still seemed like a costume but a very lazy one. The equivalent of Bowie turning up to the macabre Halloween coke party of 80s pop in casual clothes and saying "I came as David Jones".

So the next time we saw Major Tom in a lot of people's eyes he really was hitting an all-time low. Not everyone's, not the die-hards and not people who buy and listen to music based on what they hear, not what they're told by a music press who had been swallowed up by the sexless and jingoistic Britpop craze. See, with Outside what he'd done is released an elaborate concept album rife with pervy sexualised violence, violent sex, drugs, strange invented characters and references to obscure artists and art movements like Chris Burden (already visited in the Berlin days on Joe The Lion), Herman Nitsch and the Vienna Actionists. The visual component was a huge part of it all again, with unnerving videos like Samuel Bayer’s The Hearts Filthy Lesson. In interviews he was talking up Tricky and The Young Gods and saying how much he wanted to work with Glenn Branca. Being ahead of the curve by talking about the power of the internet as everyone thought he was nuts. He was even working extensively with Eno again.

You know - the sort of thing you want from Bowie!

This isn't what the British music press wanted. They wanted safe flag-waving and to be told what they knew to make them feel like they hadn't dumbed down to a degree which is still marring pop music with waves of Oasis clones because for a while it was acceptable to make bland drivel devoid of imagination or sensuality. They smeared Bowie's dabbling with jungle and drum'n'bass as a sad old man trying to stay in touch when in reality it was really just in continuity with him learning to play sax as a teenager because that's what all the cool jazz musicians he looked up to did, making "plastic soul" on Young Americans and welding the cold European sensibility of Low, "Heroes" and Lodger to the beating heart of the black American rhythm section of Davis, Murray and Alomar. Cultural segregation, two world wars and one world cup was what they wanted and they didn't want ageing mavericks showing up and demonstrating how hopelessly conservative they were.

A lot of the incredibly dull music being hyped up to the skies was, just like it was with the New Romantics, made by Bowie fans. So the time was right for him to come back but could he have not just have given them Ziggy again? Something with nice short songs, loud guitars, some dramatic strings. This time a bit more hetero, though, so the lads mag readers weren’t left shifting about uncomfortably again the way they were whenever they saw Richey James Edwards.

"Do you like girls or boys? It's confusing these days"

If you're not paying attention you can almost miss it but Hallo Spaceboy is, in fact, mentioning Ziggy / Bowie as much as it mentions Major Tom if not more. In those two lines we see Bowie cagily re-opening the closet door now it's safe for him to do so, and doing so on a mind-fuck of a concept album closer to the spirit of Ziggy or Diamond Dogs than almost anything he'd done since (The Thin White Duke was as much coke psychosis as an actual character). Before this the last time he was really clear about this was on Scream Like A Baby where he talked about queer bashing ("They came down on the faggots") and obliquely mentioned a gay love affair. Then let's look at the remix: it doesn't get much gayer than The Pet Shop Boys, really, does it? The Pet Shop Boys remixing a song from a polymorphously perverse album where he sings from the point of view of various genders: just listen to his alarming pitched-up Baby Grace voice or the strange androgynous Vocoderised ice queen voice of Ramona A Stone. 

Most offensively of all, though, however much you laughed at him it didn’t really work because he was very aware that it was funny. The segues between tracks were full of gallows humour and the Algeria Touchshriek voice sounds like nothing so much as Peter Cook’s E.L. Wisty character; it’s very serious stuff but as you hear Bowie intone “The screw is a tightening atrocity, I shake as the reeking flesh is as romantic as hell” in The Voyeur Of Utter Destruction (As Beauty) there’s a faint smirk under it. He is always aware of his own absurdity.

Outside didn't spawn any of the sequels he talked about doing but it's no surprise: artists tend to talk about at least five times as many ideas as they actually follow through and work on. There were drum'n'bass and jungle rhythms creeping in on I'm Deranged and We Prick You, some classic Bowie ballads like Strangers when We Meet (itself, like Teenage Wildlife, in the "Heroes" continuum and one of my favourite Bowie songs) and some homages to what Scott Walker was up to at the moment like The Motel or A Small Plot of Land. He wasn't setting the trends now: he was following them and the best you can hope for is that rather than trying to assimilate into it as he did in the 80s he was putting them into the Bowie blender.

This, however, misses the point that he was never that original in the first place! The way he presented his ideas was, and he had a unique singing voice but the fact is that he just had his ear to the underground and did these things to a mass audience so they just looked new. In that respect Outside is no more or less original than Low or one of the records everyone goes on about it just happens that when it came out it wasn't the first time the masses were hearing these sounds as it was when he made the second side of Low which sounds like Cluster or Harmonia. Bowie’s value wasn’t as an inventor of new sounds it was as a way of making them digestible and emotionally accessible to everyone in a way which may then allow the actual innovators (and he did always cite his sources) to break through to more success: this is quite laudable.

So then of course he went on tour with NIN, continuing to refuse to "act like a man his age". Now this raises an interesting question about Bowie's public perception. How is it that he was an old man 20 years ago when he was in his late 40's - early 50's but then when he died he was too young to go? Could it be that as rock'n'roll, still a young artform, develops that our perceptions of performers capability changes? The fact is that for a pervy old man, as he was labelled at the time, he still looked very youthful and very vital. Far sexier, far more dangerous than any of the Britpop boys who'd grown up on his music but who shuffled about in tracksuit tops and shapeless jeans. As this live TV clip shows, with Gail Ann Dorsey looking just as androgynous and unworldly as he ever did but with seemingly the minimum of effort; and Mike Garson looking deranged.

The right people were listening: Fincher saw the potential to run The Heart’s Filthy Lesson over the credits of Se7en and Lynch used I’m Deranged in Lost Highway. Both were similarly grim end of the 20th Century blues, meditations on madness. Both soundtracks, coincidentally enough, featured the work of NIN and Coil: it’s a little frustrating how close in terms of interests Bowie and Coil are, how few degrees of separation there are between these immensely influential queer occultist artists and that they never actually worked together. 

He continued in this vein with Earthling, still upsetting everyone by continuing to do what he felt like doing rather than digging up old characters. A subtle “fuck you” to the beige whitewashed sounds of Brit-pop in the cover where he wears a stained and tattered Union Jack coat as he looks out over an idealised version of England’s green (screened) and pleasant land. This on an album as infused with contemporary black music as Young Americans was. Even his huge 50th birthday show was as much of a celebration of Bowie present and looking forward as a fond look at what had been. Then, of course, "Hours" came.

Now "Hours" is perhaps an unfairly maligned album: if anyone else had put out an album with songs as great as Thursday's Child and Survive on they'd be praised to the skies and rightly so. They are moving, perfectly constructed pop songs but there's no real fire or spark of innovation in them. What little emotional impact there is has been drowned in high-tech production that covers everything in an unpleasant sheen. This is possibly as much Mark Plati and Reeves Gabrels fault as Bowie's as this is his most straightforwardly collaborative album (with every song co-credited to Gabrels) but I'm not sure. I feel like Reeves Gabrels gets unfairly criticised as he's been involved in some of the most ridiculous things Bowie has done (i.e. Tin Machine) and he appeared onstage in daft outfits playing wanky guitar solos.

He's also been involved in some of my favourite Bowie songs, however, and if you see him playing with The Cure he's not as huge a presence. He’s not jumping all over everything with fretboard tapping and lunging around waggling his tongue like Gene Simmons with a PhD: this implies that he cut such a larger than life figure because his boss wanted him to as much as anything else. So despite his persona bordering on that of a middle-aged man enthusiastically demonstrating FX pedals to you in a guitar shop, blaming him too much is misguided.

According to the excellent Pushing Ahead of the Dame blog, it was around this time Bowie started thinking about making a Ziggy Stardust film and as such he was annoyed by Velvet Goldmine's fictionalised steps into the same territory. Todd Haynes' Velvet Goldmine is an enjoyable film but I can see why he'd be so annoyed with it: it is clearly the work of a gay fan feeling betrayed by him “going back in” circa Let’s Dance. Possibly the great man was realising this wasn’t one of his best moves however well it worked at the time. After "Hours" was out and around the time of Heathen in 2002, Bowie changed his tune regarding Ziggy: “I’m running like fuck from that…Can you imagine anything uglier than a nearly 60-year-old Ziggy Stardust? I don’t think so!".

Similar ambivalence towards the idea is hinted at by the shelving of the video for the Pretty Things Are Going To Hell (itself a dual reference to The Stooges and Hunky Dory) where Bowie is menaced by huge puppets of past characters: the Pierrot from Ashes To Ashes, The Man Who Sold The World, The Thin White Duke and of course Ziggy. Maybe he judged it to be a bit on the nose.

It is an interesting change in perception we've undergone. In 1996 he was too old to be performing like he used to do but in 2013, at the age of 66, there were whispers about how great it'd be if he toured again. Not in any other industry do you expect a 66 year old man to get up onstage and dance about trying to be sexy for two or three hours a night. He could've done it like Dylan or Cohen (who only started touring again when he was much older than Bowie, true) but it wouldn't really have been his style: here was a man for who dance and mime and stagecraft had been an integral part of what made him a star. It’s still very present in his last videos and one of his final works was an honest to God musical after all.

So in the Blackstar video when we see that Major Tom is dead and at peace at last what are we to make of it? Clearing house for a whole new phase of experimentation and new ideas or a man on his last legs knowing that even if he didn't die straight after making this album he didn't have forever and was in the winter of his years? This is where we start to maybe give him too much credit. He was a man, and a great man but not a superhero. Superheroes don’t do things like release terrible covers of Iggy Pop songs with Tina Turner bolted onto them.

“Ah but he only did that to keep his good friend financially solvent.”.

Okay, good point.

He was a very intelligent man but not some towering inhuman intellect who could've predicted the moment Blackstar's "Something happened on the day he died, his spirit rose a metre and stepped aside" soundtracking the moment we knew we knew we knew. Maybe he predicted that it'd be a long while before somebody else took his place because things aren't set up that way. The industry has no interest in promoting bravery, the shock of the new. But he can't possibly have predicted that he was soundtracking millions of people thinking "He's gone, isn't he?" when he wrote that in remission. To think that he did is ridiculous, isn't it?

Isn't it?

#david bowie #by dan wreck